“Animal
agriculture,” advocates tell us, “accounts for 98 percent of all animal
suffering and killing.” [1] What does “all animal
suffering and killing” mean? Lawyers David Wolfson and Mariann Sullivan
tell us more specifically that farm animals make up 98 percent of all
animals “with whom humans interact in the United States.” [2]

This 98 percent figure is a cue: Read on,
and you’ll likely find a discussion of squalid warehouses crammed full of
miserable beings. Next, you’ll read that most farm animals are virtually
invisible to federal law. [3] And finally, because any
efficiency is justified in mass production, advocates will often urge
support for traditional farming and cage-free eggs. [4]

Yes, animal
factories display an obscene disregard for the interests of any conscious
beings caught up in their soulless venture. But it makes little sense to
try to replace them with supposedly less offensive business practices such
as free-range farms.

Here’s a reality
check: US corporations annually process over eight billion chickens.
[5] Add over 100 million pigs, and about 40 million
cattle, calves, sheep and lambs. [6] The total number of
fish raised for human consumption is in the billions. [7]
In order to provide quality of life for the cattle and sheep and chickens,
we’d have to clear any remaining national parks and forests, and then
invade several more countries.

Rather than point
out bluntly that our animal “interactions” have gotta go, non-profit
advocacy groups lavish money on campaigns that suggest farm animals can be
treated more like pets. [8] Only their naïveté is uncaged.
Free-range production, by its very nature, could never be affordable to
most of humanity; nor could the planet endure all that methane and manure.
And as they push their ill-advised and expensive plans, advocacy groups
become consultants to agribusiness. Their employees commit to memory the
dimensions of cages, the mechanics of slaughter. What’s gained from this?

Animal welfare laws,
even where they could fit, would extend no kindnesses to animals where
doing so would substantially cut into profit. And no matter what
regulations apply to slaughter, at the bottom line, dead means dead.

Reining in
the Activists

Animal-welfare
advocacy largely functions to ensure that activists conform to the
received social and economic template. It transforms activists into paid,
staid professionals who negotiate with a few companies over the caging and
killing of the animals we commodify, the animals we use. These
professionals select videos and reports for publicity value, then find
decision-makers who are willing to negotiate, or at least to add pious
phrases like “animal compassion” to the corporate and legislative lexicon.
And although the reporters who discuss these campaigns use the terms
“animal welfare” and “animal-rights” interchangeably, professional welfare
lobbying does not advance animal rights. [9] It agrees
instead to elaborately codify the human right to use other animals, and
commodified animals will always be rightless. That’s what it means to be
property.

Throughout the
advancement of bigger, better confinement and healthy, sustainable
animals, free-living animals are continually pushed to the outermost edges
of habitable terrain. Professional campaigners relegate animal rights to
the margins of activism just as they relegate the animals who can have
rights to the margins of the globe. While they focus on goals such as
“improving the living and dying conditions” of animals sold as fast food
[10], they let the interests of free animals languish
and become invisible. Yet if free-living animals were thought to have a
claim to their territory and freedom, then finally, finally, the polluting
and resource-consuming ranchers and animal farmers would meet a true
challenge! Animal-welfare advocacy deals only with symptoms, in contrast,
and will do so infinitely, without ever challenging our permission to use
animals.

If campaigners got
serious, they’d have to implicate their colleagues and partners. Question
revered family traditions. Pause to reflect on the content of their
refrigerators. That’s the work of putting animal-rights theory into
action; and no, it hasn’t a thing to do with making threats or using
force. It involves a commitment to avoid violence -- a far more radical
proposal.

Let me illustrate
this. I was recently invited to speak by the animal law section of a state
bar association. Compilations of the panelists’ work were published.
Notices went out to lawyers, students, and activists, announcing such
heady topics as defending civil and criminal cases and the effect of the
Patriot Act on animal activism. Legal education credits were arranged.
PowerPoint technology was in place, as was a collection of gifts for the
speakers. The one thing no organizer had assured was that the products of
animal agriculture wouldn’t be spread across the back table.

My question about
breakfast drew sympathy, then impatience. The caterers, I heard, couldn’t
modify the normal routine. I offered to buy the food, to no avail. This
carried on for three days. Finally I decided to refuse to speak in the
room. The day before the event, one of the organizers sent me an e-mail:
Somebody fixed it.

Then there’s the
much vaunted “seafood boycott” to rid Newfoundland of its annual seal
massacre. If the humane experts and snow-suited militants understood
advocacy as meaningfully implicating the habits of their own communities,
they would never have buddied up with Whole Foods Marketand conjured up a
seafood boycott to be turned off and on depending on the Canadian
government’s quota for seal pelts. A holistic intervention (rather than
a spectacle) means that we’re as respectful of marine life and the marine
ecology as we expect the Canadian coast-dwellers to be. And because a
holistic intervention would view Newfoundlanders as potential allies, it
would exert its economic pressure not on the people living as near to the
poverty line as to the sea, but on the government that sets the quotas,
opens new markets, and fails to engage the human potential of its coastal
populace.

Free-Range
Follies

The point of an
animal-rights movement isn't to narrowly tailor angst to whatever seems
crude and barbaric, preferably done by foreigners. The most difficult,
often the loneliest, and yet ultimately the most meaningful activism
involves the local vegetarian or humane society or the sing-along at the
peace café. The cream in the coffee might seem, to some, unworthy of
political action, but the milk of the mothers of others is a good place to
begin to interrogate our universal domination of other conscious beings --
indeed, the idea of domination itself. In the cream, we see the experience
of a cow whose life consists of pregnancies and separations and whose
death is violent, and if animal-rights activism means anything, it
involves that cream, that product of deforestation that ruins the earth
for animals who could have enjoyed a life of freedom. The cream in the
coffee connects us with the polluted streams and the pesticides that
poison workers and the land.

After we weather the
tempests in our own teapots, we can pressure our universities and
municipalities to disengage from the promotion of dairy and flesh
products.

Students can be an
essential part of this community activism; but so far we find students
acting like salespeople. After meeting with the campus “animal rights”
group,
the University of Connecticut recently agreed to buy Certified Humane
Raised and Handled eggs. The campus newspaper explained: “Some
students have been vocal in the pursuit of a dining facility that follows
a ‘farm-to-fork’ philosophy, emphasizing humane treatment of animals and
minimal processing.” The new eggs cost double what the old eggs did, but
the dining hall’s assistant manager is delighted with the new, improved
oval reproductive morsels: The banana bread is now "lighter and fluffier”
and students “seem to be eating more eggs just to try them out.”

When several school
cafeterias in Washington, D.C. made similar moves, the
Humane Society of the United States praised the trend. The Baltimore Animal Rights Coalition
carried the news to suburban Sterling and Fairfax, Virginia, advertising
the "conditions in which animals live and die on factory farms” and
pressing Wegmans to “join its competitors Whole Foods, Wild Oats and
Trader Joe’s” -- groceries that already stock the connoisseur-class eggs.

I hope the reader
will wonder why the advocates don’t simply recommend that people refrain
from egg shopping. I wonder myself. I presume that they’ve become
accustomed to wielding the leverage that’s the privilege of consumers.
Being players.

Most “free-range”
offerings are, in reality, mass-produced commodities involving no pastures
at all. The egg and dairy industries are notorious for their overall
treatment, and the few cast-offs living in sanctuaries were typically
found starved, neglected or abused -- common situations for animals raised
for human consumption, including on so-called family farms.

Showing
Animal Agribusiness the Door

So the animal-rights
revolution will not be found on the farm. Even when advocates do intervene
for free-living animals, activism is meaningless unless it champions a
lifestyle free of animal products. Notably, militant groups that condemn
meat eating still leave dairy and eggs up to the activist. Then, still
ambivalent about boycotting animal agribusiness, the militants set off to
release and rescue animals.

Little if anything
changes after a private act of rescue. The laws protecting the industries
become stricter, but demand does not change. Radical activism would mean
going to the root of the problem, dissuading the public from supporting
animal agribusiness. A firebomb can’t do that any better than an
undercover video showing violations of the Animal Welfare Act. These
aren’t radical acts. Contrary to an increasingly popular belief, making
oneself and others vulnerable to law enforcement doesn’t make anyone
radical. Offering oneself as raw material to the prison industry supports
the makers of cages. In a world where coercion has, for so long, been the
tedious norm, truly radical activism seeks and models a view in which
respect prevails.

No one can be
arrested for buying eggless noodles. Yet setting oneself free from the
social addiction to animal products is serious direct action. It’s not a
matter of decrying the worst abuses -- agriculture’s torture photos -- but
of challenging the appalling communal injustices of the everyday. At a
time when corporations have legal personhood, yet the conscious
individuals used as raw materials do not, no activism can be more basic,
more direct, or more needed.

And it’s difficult.
Even the people at your peace marches and your progressive book readings
will deny a radical idea when it implicates lunch. Don’t alienate people,
you’ll be told. Everyone must travel at their own pace along the path. I
believe this hesitance is born of fear, and that it goes back a long way.
People still associate survival with fighting and vanquishing; just look
at children's cartoons and the old fear is there. We homo sapiens are an
insecure lot. We’re all still fighting and vanquishing animals by
deliberately ignoring the unremitting destruction of their territory. By
ignoring their numbers when they fall in the wars we wage. By the
deforestation of their habitat and the expansion of our farming. By only
permitting them to exist insofar as we can take advantage of them as
tourist attractions, experimental subjects, film props, guards,
playthings, or something to package in bright yellow foam and unwrap,
ingest, and excrete.

The free-range
notion doesn't challenge any of it. It injects an incoherent sort of
flexibility into people who'd otherwise by drawn to vegetarian ideals. But
professional welfare advocacy hasn’t come for ideals; it's come for
bargaining power. The sprawling welfare administrations could never
pressure multinational corporations, or make high-profile agreements and
expand their sphere of influence and grow their millions in various banks
if their members were vegetarians. So they become gatekeepers, experts on
how to handle the 98% of animals with whom we interact.

Animal rights is
only a viable idea as long as there is an animal world at liberty to avoid
such interactions. We think of the future for wolves, for caribou, for
nectar bats, pronghorn antelope, Atlantic salmon and sea turtles.

There is a saying
that people often somehow resemble the animals with whom they live.
Perhaps we could say that people resemble the animals for whom we
advocate. Those who advocate for the rights of free-living animals --
which are, ultimately, the only animal rights there are -- won’t be tamed.

Lee
Hall is
legal director of Friends of Animals, an animal-rights advocacy group
founded in New York in 1957. Lee thanks Priscilla Feral and Daniel Hammer
for helpful discussions of the ideas in this essay, and welcomes further
discussion at:
leehall@friendsofanimals.org.

[1] Jim Mason, “The
Root of (Just About) All Evil” in Vegetarian Viewpoints, the
newsletter of the Mid-Hudson Vegetarian Society (Vol. 10, No. 3; Summer
2005). A similar statement appears in “The Animals’ Platform: Animals in
Agriculture” (draft 2004), published by the Institute for Animals and
Society (hereinafter “The Animals’ Platform: Animals in Agriculture”).
[2] “Foxes in the Hen House” in Animal Rights: Current Trends and New
Directions, edited by Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (Oxford
University Press, 2004), p206. The other 2% are killed in research,
testing, dissection, fur production, hunting and pounds. Ibid, p207.
[3] According to Wolfson and Sullivan, “it is not unfair to say that, as a
practical matter, farmed animals have no legal protection at all.” Ibid,
p206. The Humane Slaughter Act exempts over 95% of farm animals and the
Animal Welfare Act, usually associated with laboratory practices, exempts
all farm animals. See ibid, p207. Quite arguably, the legal customs
surrounding the use of animals in experiments do not reflect human
consideration for other animals, but rather the codification of our
privilege to use such animals instrumentally. And religions have long
prescribed acceptable methods of slaughter -- prescriptions that similarly
served as part of hardening into custom a code of practice that took for
granted human hegemony over the biocommunity.
[4] See Lee Hall, “Sustainable,
Free-Range Farms and Other Tall Tales: Factory Farming's Not the Problem
-- It's Animal Farming,” Dissident Voice, November 8, 2005.
[5] "Poultry Slaughter", National Agricultural Statistics Service (7 Jan.
2004), cited in “The Animals’ Platform: Animals in Agriculture.”
[6] U.S. Department of Agriculture Livestock Slaughter 2002 Summary (March
2003), cited in “The Animals’ Platform: Animals in Agriculture.” The
number reflects the approximate total of cows and sheep.
[7] See “The Animals’ Platform: Animals in Agriculture” (internal
citations omitted).
[8] One sanctuary for former farm animals promises that a bequest “can
guarantee that your voice for farm animals carries on, until farm animals
are protected from abuse forever.” The same website shows celebrities
kissing farm animals, and Linda Blair saying, “Turkeys are misunderstood.
Once I adopted turkeys, I understood this large bird to be a great
companion. Contrary to popular belief, they are sweet, kind and funny. My
adopted girls filled my heart every day with joy.” In China, the Animals
Asia campaign called “Friends, or Food?” declares that “[r]esponsible pet
ownership is undoubtedly crucial if we are to build harmony between people
and animals,” and therefore attempts to persuade the public that dogs and
cats should be used commercially only in the pet trade.
[9] Animal rights and animal welfare have mutually exclusive goals.
Animal-rights theory rules out the commodification of conscious beings.
The extension of humane welfare measures accepts and ever furthers
commodification. Because husbandry innovations that reduce stress are
compatible with the efficient use of animals and the improvement of the
resulting product, charities and industry experts alike focus on
modifications that best present the appearance of success for each.
[10] The phrase appears in a promotion by People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals, as does the statement that “KFC has a responsibility to ensure
that the chickens raised for its buckets are protected from the worst
cruelties.”